Patara Beach is eighteen kilometres of undeveloped sand on the Lycian coast of southwestern Türkiye, in Antalya province near Kalkan, the longest beach in the country, with the buried capital of the Lycian League behind its dunes and loggerhead turtles nesting on it each summer, and it is entered under a Roman arch through the ruins of the city and walked until the footprints stop. The city of Patara was the port and the parliament of the Lycian League, the federation of 23 towns whose delegates cast one, two or three votes each depending on size in a semicircular chamber that Montesquieu praised and Hamilton cited in the Federalist Papers, restored and sat in today; the road in passes beneath a triple-arched gate raised around 100 AD to carry the aqueduct, and the theatre seated 6,000 on 34 rows with a two-storey stage building still standing, climbed for the view over the dunes that buried the city after the harbour silted. Nero's harbour lighthouse stood for fourteen centuries until the earthquake and tsunami of 1481 knocked it down and the dunes closed over it, and it has been dug out and rebuilt stone by stone, the oldest lighthouse standing anywhere.
The beach itself has one boardwalk, one café and no buildings, since the whole strand is a protected nesting site, and twenty minutes along the sand from the boardwalk there is nobody left, only the dune field and the surf, with the dunes still travelling inland. Loggerheads haul out onto the sand to nest from May, peaking in June and July, and after some 52 days the hatchlings run for the sea through August and September, with the sex of each decided by the heat of the sand rather than its genes, so the beach closes at dusk in season. Saint Nicholas, the bishop who became Santa Claus, was born in this harbour city around 270. Patara is a beach with a parliament behind it, and the sand that buried the city is still moving.